🪄 Software should be fun. Reading should be serious. Somehow both. 🪄

📜 A Quiet Contract, Broken In Small Pieces

Reading used to be a quiet contract. You bought a book, you owned it, you read it, it was yours. Software agreed, for a while. Then one evening you went looking for the export button that used to live in the corner of the reader, and it wasn't there. The highlight you made last winter was somewhere, but not where you could reach it. The font size control had become two arrows and a shrug. Nothing announced itself. The category just drifted, the way categories drift when the product stops being for the person holding it.

The drift had a shape, even if nobody named it. Ownership stopped being the default — books became access, revocable, tied to an account. Annotations got rich and then got stuck; they could not leave the app that made them. Reading itself became telemetry, locked to a server that knew what page you were on but would not tell you in a file. Libraries built over a decade resisted being moved. And every few years, an application a reader had trusted was quietly discontinued, its books made suddenly heavier to carry forward.

None of this was a scandal. It just happened. What's left in the apps that already exist is polite, brightly-lit, and uninterested in what a person actually wants to do with a book at eleven at night. The small respects went first. Then the larger ones followed, dressed as convenience.

Ownership was the default, then it was taken away. ScrollWizard is a small, stubborn attempt to give it back. Your files stay files. Your highlights leave with you when you leave. The app has opinions about type, margins, and dark mode, and it states them plainly instead of hiding them behind a wand. The rest of this page is what that looks like in practice.

📖 The Kind Of Person Who Builds This

ScrollWizard was built by someone who has reorganised a bookshelf more than once, on purpose, and remembered which shelf the Le Guin used to live on. Someone who finds it rude to be sold a subscription inside a chapter, and ruder still to be turned into a streak. The kind of person who treats “export your data” as table stakes, not a premium feature, and who suspects that an app refusing to tell you what page you're on, in a file, is probably hiding something.

That posture is the entire design brief. SuperComfySoft makes the app; the maker stays unnamed on purpose. What you can know about them is in the product: it acts like it's been used by a reader, because it has.

⚠️ Two Failures Nobody Fixes

Dark PDFs

Most reading apps polish themselves around one format and tolerate the other. They will let a reader pick between four shades of sepia for an EPUB, and then, when the same reader opens a PDF for work at eleven at night, happily set fire to their retinas. Theming a PDF to match the rest of the app is not a difficult problem. The fact that so few apps bother is a tell — it means nobody on the team actually reads PDFs in the dark.

Getting Your Books Out

Every app makes it effortless to put books in. Almost none make it effortless to get them out. Try it sometime: find the EPUB you imported last spring, the one with the cover you remember, and move it to another app. You will discover — if your reader is typical — that there is no Open in…, no “reveal in Files”, no folder you can browse. The book is somewhere inside the application, and the application would prefer you not think about that. Annotations are worse: they are facts about a book stored in a place that book cannot leave.

ScrollWizard treats both as first-class. PDFs inherit the app's theme — dark mode is dark mode. The library lives in a folder in iCloud Drive that you already own. Books go in by dropping files. Books come out by copying files. Moving to another app tomorrow is a Finder operation, not a support ticket. If ScrollWizard is ever discontinued, your library survives it — because it was never inside ScrollWizard in the first place.

📂 Work Isn't Pleasure, And Shouldn't Share A Shelf

Most apps treat a library as a single shelf. Two hundred novels next to two hundred technical books, sorted by “recently added”, and the reader is expected to cope. This is the behaviour of an app made by people who have never managed a bookshelf. The morning's Kubernetes manual and the evening's Le Guin should not live in the same room, let alone on the same shelf, let alone three taps from each other in the same scroll.

ScrollWizard organises by domain. Work, fiction, study — or whatever categories fit a particular reader — partition the library into separate spaces. Switching domain is like switching rooms. What you read for a living stays where you do that work. What you read to be alive sits somewhere else, waiting with a different light on.

✨ The Small Respects

Most of what ScrollWizard does right is not flashy. It's the long list of small mercies that readers have quietly learned to do without elsewhere, ordered roughly from forgettable to load-bearing:

• Multi-select and batch import, the way the rest of the device already works.
• The default dictionary lookup happens inside the app, inline — not inside a browser the app has just launched. (Optional web sources are there too, one tap away, if you want them.)
• Footnotes open in a popup, not a 300-page teleport.
• A PDF opened at eleven at night looks like it belongs there.
• Annotations on reflowable text behave like annotations — they stay with the words, not the pixels underneath — and they leave with you when you leave.

💬 The Credo, Stated Plainly

Everything above adds up to a small set of deliberate constraints. They are not features. They are the shape of the product, and they are not up for negotiation.

• iOS only. Exceptional on one platform beats mediocre on four. Cross-platform readers are, almost without exception, worse than native ones.
• EPUB and PDF only. Everything else — AZW3, MOBI, CBZ — is thirty seconds in Calibre. This is a reader, not a format zoo.
• iCloud only. No third-party cloud integrations. Your files already live somewhere you know. The app meets them there.
• No subscription. The app is free. A single optional purchase unlocks Advanced Wizard Mode for roughly the price of a coffee. That is the entire business model.
• No pressure. No accounts. No analytics. Reading stats, yes — but a number you can glance at, not a chain you can break. No upsells between chapters.

🪄 The Contract, Restored

None of this is hard to build. It is just what a person who reads would expect an app for reading to do. The book is a file. The file is yours. The highlights you make are yours. The page sits there and lets you read it. When you're done, or when you've had enough of ScrollWizard, your library walks out of the app the same way it walked in — by being copied somewhere else.